The old saying goes, "The only thing that remains the same is change." With that in mind, what makes individuals into historical transitional figures? More often than not, this role falls upon well qualified people who are willing to embrace change, to apply the best of what they have to new realities.

Edouard Manet had all the skills. Anne Hoenigswald, conservator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington who restored Manet's The Old Musician explains how bright the painting is with the removal of old varnish, and she adds a personal comment that Manet "really knew how to handle paint.

But skill as a painter wasn't enough to make him "transitional." For that, he needed to be in the right historical context, and he had to be most open to and enchanted by change. In Manet, we have an extraordinarily well skilled artist alive at the right times. Paris and all of France was changing, and Edouard Manet was willing to change with it.

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Always an immaculately well dressed gentleman with all the right touches including fashionable gloves and a stylish walking cane, he valued being able to enter the French Salon through the front door. He appeared at first glance to be the epitome of the establishment. But today, Edouard Manet is viewed as a revolutionary and the one most responsible for laying the groundwork for and setting in place the bedrock of modern art.

He was criticized for being different, for not painting what he was expected to paint. He dared to challenge accepted norms and paint what he knew, what he saw about him, a Paris in the flux of dramatic change. Whether it was in landscape, portraiture, nudes, or still lifes, Manet challenged tradition, painting the Paris around him in new and daring ways. Those wedded to tradition found him offensive while others found him a breath of fresh air and new life.

Manet - The Man Who Invented Modern Art, (Part 1 of 6) Using the life of Manet as his narrative arch, Waldemar Januszczak tells the story of a complex and difficult man who started a revolution that continues to rumble on today. (Follow links at the end of each video segment to view more. For better viewing, use the expand screen feature at the bottom of the window.)

Homage to Delacroix, Fantin-Latour

Lunch on the Grass

Manet was born into a family filled with judges, and the rigid mold was set to mint him into a lawyer and judge as well. Manet wanted no part of the family business, and over time, asserted his right to choose his own path. One of the major elements in Manet's makeup was his strength of character, forged as he overcame his family's expectations. In his art, he found an avenue to express himself as he chose to paint, unimpaired by the expectations and conventions of his day.

Portrait of Amedee Berger,Thomas Coulture

Manet lived at an exciting time in Paris, an age of amazing change. Napoleon III had come to power promising to return France to its former greatness. For Manet, the French society's fight between tradition and change was mirrored in his family experience.

In 1850, after a stressful debate with his father, Manet was allowed to participate in the workshop of Thomas Couture, the

Boy with a Sword

The Baudelaire Moment

most appreciated painter in Paris. Couture ran workshops for young artists and Manet attended for six years. Couture encouraged young Manet to paint the Paris that was around him, the trains and the factories and its people. As someone today might encourage an aspiring writer to writer to write about what he or she knows, Couture encouraged his

The Street Singer

students to paint their own history not anyone else's. In Manet's Paris, history was taking shape all around him. Napoleon III had commissioned Baron Haussmann to rebuild Paris. During a feverish twenty year period, Haussmann made his enduring mark on the city, establishing uniform building heights, grand boulevards, parks, statues and fountains, and setting off these changes with new jewels including the Arc de Triomphe and the Grand Opera House. Manet lived in a huge construction zone, and he embraced it.

But change was not just happening in architecture and urban planning, the French had become enthralled with the style of Spain, an infusion of cultural life they called Hispanomania. Spanish music, dance, style, Spanish story-lines, Spanish blood lust and Spanish art were everywhere. And Manet was being influenced by the work of Velazquez and Goya, work that was direct and gutsy, far removed from the classic mythologies in French painting. It fit right in with Manet's background and training, and he was thrilled with this new energy.

The Dead Christ with Angels

Monk at Prayer

The Dead Torero

The Balcony

His major early work is The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe). It was rejected by the Salon of 1863 but was exhibited in the same building in the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected). To say the least, the image of fully dressed men and a nude woman in public was controversial and memorable.

Also in 1863, Manet painted Olympia, based on Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538) and reminiscent of Francisco Goya's The Nude Maja (1800). This painting was accepted by the Paris Salon of 1865, but it was considered scandalous. Precautions by the exhibitors protected the canvas from being punctured by offended viewers. Part of the painting's controversial nature was that the woman was partially clothed, wearing an orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck and slippers, all drawing attention to her nakedness, her sexuality, and her lack of shame which served to make her presense at the salon all the more confrontational. The painting was appreciated by a host of great painters yet to make their marks, Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and later Paul Gauguin.

Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets

In 1868, Manet became a friend of Berthe Morisot. She attempted to convince Manet to paint plein air which she had learned from Camille Corot. Morisot was successful to a point, as some of her technique found its way into Manet's painting. It was through his friendship with Morisot that Manet became friends with a wider circle of impressionist painters Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro. In 1874, Berthe Morisot became Manet's sister-in-law when she married Manet's brother, Eugene.

Manet was influenced by the impressionists but chose to distance himself from them nonetheless. Yet Manet took from the impressionists a lightened pallette, and a looseness for his own purposes.

Manet enjoyed Parisian life and this can be seen most notably in his Cafe paintings. As any visitor to Paris well knows, Cafes are the best place

The Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil

A Turning Point

to "people watch." His loosely painted snapshots of Bohemian life capture the mood and vibrancy of the city.

Still lifes held a modest position in Manet's hierarchy, yet he painted them. For him they were far more than decorative works or imitations of the masters. He chose to use still life to express drama, a challenge which informed the rest of his artistic endeavors.

Manet was always a history painter. Because his family had definite political views, it is no

Woman Reading

Peonies on a Pedestal

surprise that Manet's views usually ran counter to those of his family. His painting of The Execution of Emperor Maximillian is an example of Manet's willingness use his paintings for political commentary . This painting shows an homage to Francisco Goya's The Third of May, 1808 and was later honored in Pablo Picasso's Korean Massacre.

It is also no surprise that Manet was drawn to the stories of other revolutionaries, those who would dare upset the established norms. Victor Henri Rochefort, a French journalist and politician, was sentenced to life in prison in New Caledonia. He escaped in 1874 and made his way to San

Rochefort's Escape

Asparagus

The Execution of Emperor Maximillian

Francisco on an American ship. He then made his way to London where he lived until 1880 when he was permitted to return to France. Manet's Rochefort's Escape was meaningful for him. His friend Claude Monet is quoted as saying in December of 1880, "I saw Manet, in good enough health, very much taken up with a sensational painting for the Salon - Rochefort escaping in a rowing boat on the open sea."

Korean Massacre, Pablo Picasso

There is far more to tell regarding Eduard Manet's "inventing modernity," but certainly part of what made him so right for the times was his willingness and delight to depart from tradition in favor of responding to the life and change he found around him. His art reverberates with the energy of his times.

Truly transitional figures don't set out to be transitional. That is a label placed upon them in retrospect. At the time, a transitional figure does not have the hindsight of history. He or she only takes the talent and skills that they have and applies them in the times and circumstances in which each lives, with a willingness to let go of tradition and embrace new ideas to fit the changing times. Looking back, we can see Manet in a manner he could not have seen himself. We can see him in the context of what came after him, and we can appreciate how this extaordinary painter's contributions led to the invention of modernity.

In 1888, William Keith reflected on his painting career, saying "I often think that a painter's experience consists of three states, just as in life there are three states of childhood, youth and manhood. In the first state, the young painter is full of ideas and vague feelings, but he cannot express them. In the second state ... he accumulates all kinds of facts, and the knowledge and facts crowd out the vague and mysterious impulses and feelings ..." The third state combines the dreamy impulses of the first state with the ability to paint realistically of the second."... from the Art of William Keith, exhibition publication, article by Alfred C. Harrison Jr.

"The Comprehensive Keith" currently at Saint Mary's College Museum of Art features over a hundred oil paintings and watercolors, mostly landscapes with a few dazzling portraits. The exhibit covers the two distictive realms of Keith's work. As a younger painter, Keith was a dramatic interpreter of grandeur of California's exceptional landscape, in a lighter palette and influenced by the Hudson River School artist Albert Bierstadt. But as Keith matured and after a trip to Europe, he was influenced by the French Barbizon painters, painting darker and moodier landscapes meant to embody the spirit and feeling one had in response to the

William Keith, Photo with Easel

The Comprehensive Keith at the Hearst Galleries
St. Mary's College in Moraga

landscape. He added Barbizon aesthetics to his Hudson River School subjects, creating a hybrid style for himself.

In 1872, Keith was exposed to the remote majesty and beauty of California through his friendship with naturalist and fellow Scotsman, John Muir. The pair remained friends their entire lives, although Muir didn't seem to appreciate Keith's embrace of Barbizon styles. Regarding their artistic difference, the pair agreed to disagree.

He and his second wife Mary McHenry, the first woman to graduate from Hasting's Law School, traveled to Europe where he studied in Munich for

three years. When the couple returned to California, they settled in Berkeley. Keith commuted to San Francisco via ferry for years until his studio was destroyed in the fire of 1906. Afterward, he maintained his studio in Berkeley and he taught many aspiring women painters.

Keith was a highly successful painter, and garnered the attention of some wealthy patrons, most noteworthy among them railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman. During the summers of 1907 and 1908, Harriman hosted Keith at his Harriman Lodge located on Pelican Bay on Upper Klamath Lake in Oregon. It was an occasion for Keith to attempt plein air impressionist painting. But it is known that Keith was not comfortable with impressionism, considering Claude Monet and his ilk as copyists who left the soul out of nature. He felt impressionism was objective while Barbizon painting was subjective, requiring inspiration from a higher source.

(The painting of Klamath Lake with Pelicans was donated to the Saint Mary's College Museum of Art by E. H. Harriman's son, Averell Harriman. Averell Harriman was a former governor of New York, Secretary of Commerce, and a distinguished American diplomat serving as ambassador to Great Britain and the Soviet Union.)

Mountain House with Strong Shadow, circa 1880's. Oil on canvas, 14 x 34",
Collection of St. Mary's College Museum of Art, Gift of Mary B. Alexander
in memory of her husband, Wallace Alexander.

"Just the beginning ..." Life-long art lover Alice Walton speaks with Martha Teichner just prior to the opening of the Crystal Bridges Museum, dedicated to offering the full spectrum of American Art, telling the American story. The Crystal Bridges project has been a long held dream and, after being conceived in the early nineties, has been progressing toward its opening for nearly twenty years.

Martha Teichner's report offers a complimentary portrait of Alice Walton, but does not sidestep the issue of great wealth's manipulating the art market. The issues raised are quite topical today, but the issue is not new either. For thousands of years great artists and great art collections have always had their patrons, and Alice Walton is but a modern version of patrons and benefactors from long ago.

CBS Sunday Morning, Alice Walton of the newly opened Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas
November 6, 2011 7:59 AM ... "Walmart heiress Alice Walton has for many years had a dream of building a world-class museum of American art in her hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas. Now, since she is the world's third-wealthiest woman, Walton used the money to make this dream a reality."

This video is nearly 9 minutes in length and is preceded by a brief 30 second commercial.
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For us, this story begs the question, if great wealth had not commissioned, collected and maintained great art, would it have survived to this day? Isn't the art world far better off having this art preserved and available for everyone? This age-old debate will go on, but for now overall, well done Alice, and thank you for this marvelous gift.

Alice Walton of the Crystal Bridges Museum

With this video prominently posted on their site, Crystal Bridges has some fun promoting its grand opening.

WINTER HOURS: 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday effective immediately. However, we are always happy to be called to the gallery during different times on appointment or if you are early or late for our regular hours. Cell phone 510-414-9821, which is posted in the gallery window.

CHANGE IS COMING ... With sadness, we bid farewell to our famed framer, Gary Smith and his Small World Framing. Gary is moving from the area, and will be setting up shop in his new home in Paradise, California. Information on where to obtain Gail Packer limited-edition lithographs and Hildy Henry painted frames will be available in the future

For our Southland friends or those passing anywhere close to San Bernadino, The Chaffey Community Art Association in Cucamonga is hosting Milford Zornes: On Trees beginning December 2, 2011 - January 29, 2012. The exhibit features 52 paintings by Zornes, showcasing his work on trees over the long span of his career.

An artist who garners a lot of attention at our gallery is Alexander Nepote. His layerist works are the subject of a special exhibition in Belmont at the Penisula Museum of Art through Dec 18. Visit their website for more details.

In addition to the historic art on which the gallery was founded, the ongoing work of local Bodega Bay resident artists is featured.

Jean Warren, who studied with the greats of the California watercolor movement, contributes her beautiful and varied watercolors.

Diane Perry shows photographs and also offers cards of the local scenes, and particularly stunning is the way she catches birdlife in mid-flight.

Gallery co-owner Linda Sorensen presents her oil paintings principally of West Sonoma and West Marin. Her website, LindaSorensenPaintings.com

Jean Warren's next watercolor workshop will be held on six consecutive Wednesdays January 11 through February 15, 2012, 9:30-12:30. Sebastopol Center for the Arts, 707-829-4797www.sebarts.org or contact jean@jeanwarren.com .

Camille Przewodek's teachings about color and light are the subject of a new instructional DVD. Check her website for the link to order and to find out about upcoming workshops. Dale has also designed a paint-saver palette (for oil paint) that is beiing enthusiastically received. Linda has one and will be happy to demonstrate it when she works at the studio that is planned for the third room of the gallery. www.przewodek.com

The Ren Brown Collection"Established in 1989 and specializes in contemporary art from both sides of the Pacific. We offer rotating exhibits throughout the year. A major focus is modern Japanese prints. Some of the world-famous artists from Japan are SHINODA Toko, TANAKA Ryohei, NAKAYAMA Tadashi, and Daniel KELLY. These woodblock, lithograph and etching prints may be abstract or representational, and often include handmade paper."http://www.renbrown.com | Back to the Top

IN Santa Rosa The Annex Galleries specializing in 19th, 20th, and 21st century
American and European fine printsThe Annex Galleries is a member of the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA).http://www.AnnexGalleries.com| Back to the Top

Lee Youngman

IN CALISTOGA the Lee Youngman Gallery
Featuring the work of contemporary painter Paul Youngman,
and the works of famed painter, Ralph Love (1907-1992)WILLIAM A. SCHNEIDER, OPA
"Our Problem...Your Opportunity!"http://www.leeyoungmangalleries.com | Back to the Top

Paul Youngman

IN TOMALES Tomales Fine ArtHost artist Janette LeGrue Featuring local and national, award-winning artists:
Anne Blair Brown, Christin Coy, Timothy Horn, Debra Huse, Jeanette Le Grue,
John Poon, Randall Sexton, Brian Mark Taylor, and Antoinette Walker.Located 30 seconds from the Continental Inn, 8 minutes from Nick's Cove, 20 minutes from Petaluma, 30 minutes from Point Reyes Station and Santa Rosa, 1 hour from San Francisco and the Napa Valley, 2 hours from Sacramento, 6 hours from New York, and 9 hours from Paris.Open most weekends 12-5pm, and by appointment (707) 878-2525.http://www.TomalesFineArt.com| Back to the Top

IN VALLEY FORD West County DesignWest County Design provides an unexpected center of artistic sophistication in the charming town of Valley Ford in West Sonoma County. The business serves as a showroom for Bohemian Stoneworks, Current Carpets and Craig Collins Furniture. The gallery also showcases local artisans and quality furnishings for home and business.Bohemian Stoneworks, Current Carpets and Craig Collins Furniture are known for collaborating closely with both business and residential clients and designers from concept to installation. The result is uniquely personal and functional pieces that reflect our clients’ personalities and needs(Across from the Valley Ford Hotel and its famed Rocker Oysterfeller's Restaurant)http://www.westcountydesign.com |Back to the Top

IN PETALUMAVintage Bank AntiquesVintage Bank Antiques is located in Historic Downtown Petaluma, corner of Western Avenue and Petaluma Blvd. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Warren Davis and the rest of the team at Vintage Bank Antiques has assembled a spectacular inventory of paintings. From the 18th Century to Contemporary Artists. We have paintings to suit every price point and collector level.
If you have a painting for sale, please consider Vintage Bank Antiques. Contact Warren Davis directly at WarrenDavisPaintings@yahoo.com101 Petaluma Blvd. North, Petaluma, CA 94952, ph: 707.769.3097http://vintagebankantiques.com | Back to the Top

The Walt Disney Family Museum tickets available onlineThe WDFM tells Walt's story from his early days through the creation of his famed "Mouse Factory" and the Magic Kingdom. Displays superbly present pre-computerized animation, explaining the artistic, technical, and imaginative processes, Well Worth a Visit!

BolinasBolinas Museumfeaturing their permanent collection,
including Ludmilla and Thadeus Welch, Arthur William Best, Jack Wisby, Russell Chatham, Alfred Farnsworth.(thumbnail to the right ... a portion of
Elizabeth Holland McDaniel's Bolinas Embarcadero,
the green roof building on Wharf Street is the Bolinas Museum)

Sacramento
Crocker Art MuseumFlorence and the Baroque:
Paintings from the Haukohl Family Collectionthrough Feb 12The Art of Disegno: Italian Prints and Drawings
from the Georgia Museum of Art through Feb12

Palm Springs
Palm Springs Art MuseumSimply Masterful: Picasso and Artists of the Modern EraThrough Sept 4, McCALLUM WINGWestern and Native American Art
from the Permanent CollectionReopening with new selections October 18, 2011|Combining traditional and contemporary artworks, this installation presents a complex blend of cultures, landscapes, historical forces and artistic traditions that both inform and challenge our ever evolving notion of the West.

PasadenaNorton Simon Museum-Permanent collection, European paintings
Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern Californiathrough Apr 12
The Original Print: An Introduction to Printmaking
in the Postwar Periodthrough Apr 12